This invention is an improvement over U.S. Pat. No. 3,921,298, entitled DENTAL AND SURGICAL APPLIANCE, granted Nov. 25, 1975 to the same inventor.
Recent advances in dental technology have contributed immeasureably toward improved dental care and reduced pain and discomfort of the patient during treatment. Quieter, faster rotary cutting equipment developed in the 1950's has alleviated the discomfort associated with drilling in preparation for the filling of cavities. Modern dental hand pieces operating at speeds in excess of 500,000 revolutions per minute greatly reduce the vibration heretofore the chief causes of pain.
While the effectiveness of this modern high-speed equipment leaves little to be desired in terms of performance in the dental office, technology developments in home-care dental appliances have been lacking.
Dental practitioners recommend that a patient visit his dentist twice a year to have his or her teeth cleaned and polished. However, stains or blemishes do form on the teeth between visits which cannot be removed by the ordinary toothbrush. While these stains or blemishes may not be injurious to the teeth, they are unsightly and are a source of annoyance to persons who like to have their teeth free of stains and blemishes at all times.
Unduly high temperatures and undue abrasion of the enamel of the teeth will cause injury to the teeth. Dental practitioners take precautions, when polishing a patient's teeth, to prevent an undesirable rise in temperature and undue abrasion of the enamel of the teeth due to the friction between the teeth and polishing tool. The ordinary layman, however, is unaware of the precautions necessary to prevent injury to the teeth and it is impractical, if not dangerous, for him to undertake the polishing of his own teeth with most devices now known and used by dental practitioners.
In the dental field, as well as the general field of medicine, it is necessary to take extraordinary steps to ensure that the instruments or parts thereof used upon a patient and in his mouth are clean. Further, since a given appliance, even for home use, may be used by more than one individual, it is necessary that those portions used on the patient or in his or her mouth be detachable and/or replaceable for sanitation reasons.
Most known self-contained power-driven instruments are bulky in size and cannot easily reach cavities in the mouth. Recent advances in the development of small rechargeable batteries have permitted their application to a number of portable cordless electric appliances including toothbrushes, grass clippers and carving knives and the desirability of further extending the application of such batteries to include a battery-operated dental drill, polisher and surgical cutting tool is needed.